Viral marketing eh? Love it or loathe it, it’s unavoidable. Not even the great sci-fi seer Philip K. Dick could have envisioned how far companies would go in the early 21st-century in order to get their product messages right smack bang into our eyeballs in every way possible.

When confronted by pretty much 99% of what passes these days for ‘viral’ marketing our brains hardly even register it. But when we receive a strange email from Ubisoft’s PR team, who all seem to have jumped ship and all started working for Mantel Global Industries, then our brain registers a flicker of interest.

Haze, you may remember, was one of those games that was the ‘talk of E3’ last year, mainly due to the fact that it is the next major project coming out of the UK’s powerhouse developers over at Free Radical Design.

Mantel Global Industries, it turns out, is a huge multinational conglomerate in Haze with its own army, in which the game’s main protagonist, Jake Carpenter, enlists.

The company’s patented n-Keto-thyrazine substance is used for various bio-enhancing means in, amongst other things, a widely available Nectar Energy Drink. This surely can mean one thing? A looming, widespread global disaster...

Haze is currently in development for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. SPOnG just put a call into Ubisoft, so we should have a little more information on the game and the storyline shortly.

In the meantime, do check out Mantel Global Industries, as it is a genuinely impressive piece of videogame marketing.